1. Introduction

Over the past decade, American cities experienced a growing number of municipal water system failures. These range from systemic political failures in Flint, Michigan, and Jackson, Mississippi, to extended service outages related to intensifying extreme weather events: the 2025 wildfires in Los Angeles, California; the 2024 floods in Asheville, North Carolina after Hurricane Helene; and the 2021 deep freeze in Houston, Texas. Other studies suggest broader failures which did not make headlines, like water shut-offs [1] and increasing reliance on water vendors and delivery trucks [2,3]. Each water system failure may be an independent event, but collectively these failures indicate broad, substantive shifts in water provision. Echoing Gleick’s concept of peak water [4,5], we argue that the U.S. has moved beyond peak water security. That is, we are living in a time when the world’s wealthiest country is increasingly unable to provide near-universal safe, adequate, affordable, sustainable water services for households and communities. As a result, more and more households must manage with unsafe, inadequate, expensive, or unreliable water, and thus, experience some form of household water insecurity.

Household water security, defined by nearly a decade of scholarship, is understood as a household’s ability to obtain sufficient, safe and affordable water for its members to live a good life [6]. Water insecurity occurs when this ability is undermined by often multiple co-present and cumulative everyday factors, including problems with affordability, adequacy, reliability, and trustworthiness. This definition moves away from understanding water insecurity as only an issue of physical access. Instead, the concept pivots on the lived experiences of water insecurity [6,7] as an entry point to understand how power dynamics, governance structures, and cultural practices influence who gets what kind of water, when, how, and at what cost. For example, in the U.S., municipalities may intentionally exclude adjacent low-income or minoritized communities from annexation, preventing these communities from gaining access to water and wastewater services or otherwise benefiting from infrastructure investments [8–11]. These systemic racialized exclusions or low investments in water services can cascade into and exacerbate the lived experiences of ongoing inadequate water access, including increased reliance on bottled or vended water, degrading water quality and chronic water shutoffs [1,2,11–13]. Taken together, a focus on the lived experience of water insecurity demonstrates that to implement effective policy and interventions that achieve water security, we must focus our attention not just on supply but how water systems can enhance or threaten human capabilities and flourishing [14,15].

Our perspective offers two key arguments as to why new measures designed to capture water insecurity in higher income countries and contexts are needed, and urgently. First, we position the U.S. as a case study of how many residents in high-income countries and contexts increasingly experience the material realities of water insecurity. Many water systems face aging infrastructure and a greying workforce, myriad climate change pressures on water supply and quality, insufficient financial and administrative resources to expand or upgrade centralized systems, and institutional inertia (the tendency of the water sector to resist needed change) that leave water systems ill-equipped to adapt to rapidly shifting environments. Collectively, these challenges curtail the capacity of water systems and communities to provide safe, affordable, and sufficient water for healthy communities. In short, these converging pressures will cause more households and communities who have never experienced water insecurity to face an unknown water future.

Second, we argue that the research and policy communities have little understanding of the extent and severity of the new reality of living beyond peak water security due to a lack of appropriate demand-side data. Many researchers and policy makers still generally consider water crises to be exceptions rather than systematic failures, and many crises never make the news. The lack of robust, validated measures to assess water insecurity experiences reinforces the mistaken perspective that higher-income contexts enjoy near-comprehensive water security. Indeed, there are significant data gaps at the household scale; that is, the most systematic and comparative data currently available in the U.S. (and in other high-income countries) are supply-side assessments (e.g., water availability) and do not track critical demand-side experiences of water insecurity at the household and individual level. Although recent household water insecurity metrics have been validated for low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) [16,17], they do not reflect the conditions and lived realities in higher-income contexts. Thus, new tools are needed to address these challenges.

In this essay we explain how new metrics can enhance direct measurement of the prevalence and severity of water insecurity (both individual and household). We describe our own approach to developing and validating such a tool initially for the U.S., and ultimately for adaptation and use across high-income contexts globally. Accurate and precise information is critical for researchers, policymakers, and communities to document life beyond peak water security, compare outcomes across regions, and set benchmarks. In turn, stakeholders can then evaluate the complex and interrelated outcomes of water insecurity and develop water action plans that build resilience and bolster health, wellness, and economic stability for the 21^st century.

2. Beyond peak water security

We must first acknowledge that many communities in the U.S. have never benefited from water security provided by modern water systems [18,19]. Unincorporated communities, including in the Southwest [20–22], Alaska [23–25], and Appalachia [12,26] are more likely to have substandard access to water due to systemic exclusion from water development [8,10,27], leaving residents to access water from unregulated sources, like private wells, that expose them to higher health risks. Insecurity of unhoused people extends to their capacity to access water for basic needs [28,29]. Low-income families living in precarious urban housing are also at higher risk of water insecurity. Indeed, approximately 1.1 million people lacked running water in their homes in the U.S. in 2021, with an estimated 71.7% of them located in cities [30].

In addition to communities already facing water insecurity, we argue that degrading infrastructure, institutional inertia, and climate change are converging and now collectively adding more people to the ranks of the already water insecure. Fig 1 represents the declining share of the population that is water secure due to these phenomena. Each factor creates conditions that threaten water security for more and more people, with the compounding, cumulative impact of reducing water security.

Download:

• PPT
  PowerPoint slide
• PNG
  larger image
• TIFF
  original image

Fig 1. Depiction of high-income nation pathways beyond peak water security.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pwat.0000413.g001

Many U.S. water systems built in the mid-20^th century are facing the final phase of their lifecycle in which they may no longer be fully functional, economically viable, or safe to operate. In lieu of funding for upgrades and maintenance, some may need to be decommissioned, repurposed, or dismantled. The projected gap between water infrastructure needs and spending in the U.S. will grow to a record $91 billion and projected cumulative gap of over $2 trillion by 2043 [31]. Aging pipelines and the reliance on outdated treatment systems for an increasing number of emerging contaminants of concern compromise centralized water systems and place more and more communities at risk of contamination and system failure [32]. Aging service lines need replacing, especially under the conditions of climate change, such as extreme heat, increased flooding events, saltwater intrusion, and drought [33]. Many water systems that are increasingly in disrepair lack sufficient resources to manage emerging threats of water contamination. Government investments to address these costly issues are uncertain in a changing political climate.

At the same time, the human capital to support water systems is also degrading. The U.S. water workforce is underpaid relative to other technically skilled industries [34] and aging out with the median age of water employees nearly 50 years and between one-third and one-half of these workers eligible to retire in the next 5–10 years [34,35]. With these potential workforce losses and constant challenges with attrition, retention, and other workforce management issues—especially for rural and small systems—water system staffing shortages potentially undermine public safety and trust [36–38]. Moving forward utilities will also need new water specialists with the skill sets and training to deal with more complex issues like cybersecurity [39] and the expanding geographical range of natural hazards such as floods, fires, and freezes. While the workforce is critical to adapting to new water service complexities [40], the U.S. has no national plan to fill this vital need.

Resistance to change within the water sector curtails effective responses to these operational challenges—a common theme in high-income contexts [e.g., 41–43]. Bureaucratic structures are “sticky” and regulatory frameworks often become entrenched over time, making it difficult to engage with or even fathom new ideas outside the established norms and practices [44–46] as well as financial burden and public opposition [47]. In the water sector, there is a notorious resistance to change, regulatory or otherwise [48]; the sunk cost of existing infrastructure often perpetuates legacy water management practices. This is particularly acute for local governments or, in this case, water utilities, which have very little capacity and capital—human or otherwise—for change [49]. Overall, community water systems operate within narrow logics of existing regulatory regimes, pricing, and corporatized management frameworks that are oriented towards a model of universal water provision, not the reality of living beyond peak water security [50].

Infrastructure losses due to chronic climate risks of drought and acute events, like floods, compound local government financial constraints and further undermine the very foundation of centralized water provision. Wildfires threaten water supplies [51–53], destroy subsurface pipes [54], and increase nitrates in downstream watersheds [55]. Contaminants from thermal degradation of plastics cause leaching of pollutants, such as volatile organic compounds, and aerial retardants used to combat those very wildfires may also contaminate water supplies [56,57]. These are but a few impacts that increase the wildfire-watershed risk [58].

Climate-change driven saltwater intrusion is another growing threat to coastal freshwater sources [59,60], threatening water supply systems [59,61] and drinking water wells [62]. Increased and intensified storm surge and sea-level rise further erode drinking water security through salinization. For example, when drought reduced freshwater flows to the Mississippi River delta in 2023, the saltwater wedge moved up the river channel and led to saltier water at municipal drinking water intakes [63]. While the New Orleans utility avoided worst-case scenarios despite requiring a formal state of emergency declaration [64], smaller communities like Plaquemines parish were inundated with salt, forcing residents to rely on bottled water for bathing, cooking, and drinking for months. Planning for future saltwater intrusion will require massive and costly investment in desalination for smaller systems that are already struggling on the salt edge.

This decline in overall system water security parallels increasing national trends in water quality violations, increased system mistrust and tap water avoidance, and increasing plumbing poverty (i.e., inadequate household plumbing infrastructure). A 2018 study reported water quality violations have increased over the past 25 years or so. In 2015 in the U.S., nearly 21 million people—which is a little more than the total population of Finland, Norway, and Sweden—relied on community water systems out of compliance, violating health-based quality standards [32]. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, nearly 30 million Americans experience high water stress and one third of U.S. public water utilities yield contaminated water [65].

Declines in water quality and public trust in water [66] also lead to certain patterns of tap water avoidance [67,68], which is costly both in terms of affordability and human health. Recent studies have estimated that approximately 20% of Americans do not drink their tap water, and the patterns of avoidance are, unsurprisingly, racialized [69]. Black and Hispanic households are also more likely to drink bottled water and sugar-sweetened beverages [70].

We also see evidence from the American Community Survey (ACS) of an increase in households lacking complete plumbing over the past decade. Complete plumbing is defined by the U.S. Census as a housing unit with hot and cold running water, a flush toilet, and a bathtub or shower. The number of households facing plumbing poverty decreased to 391,882 in 2012 as the U.S. emerged from the Great Recession, but steadily increased to 522,752 in 2021 [71]. A more in-depth study documented an urban pivot, i.e., that the share of those without complete plumbing become urbanized. An estimated 71.7% of households without running water are in cities, which is an increase of 38.4% for urban populations between 2000 and 2021 [30]. This groundbreaking work hypothesizes that this upswing is related to significant shocks in the political economy of housing and the cost-of-living crises that have impacted the most vulnerable over the past two decades.

To compound both institutional inertia and decreasing water quality, water affordability is an escalating crisis in the U.S. [72–75], with little evidence of effective and wide-ranging institutional responses to mitigate it [76]. The expiration of a pilot federal water affordability program means that there are no federal assistance programs subsidizing water bills for low-income households [77]. Some individual localities manage water affordability through lifeline programs, like Philadelphia’s Tiered Assistance Program [78], as well as rate structure design, water efficiency programs, and one-time crisis relief programs [76]. But even for localities that can offer assistance, municipal water affordability programs often exclude renters [79]. More commonly, non-payment (i.e., “water debt”) results in shut-offs or property liens, a legal claim against a property to secure payment of a debt [1,80,81]. For example, in Lowell, Massachusetts, more than 2,800 real estate liens arose from water bills in 2018 [79]. The California State Water Resources Control Board determined that residents held almost $1 billion in water debt [82], and although most of it was forgiven by California in 2024 through an allocation of federal funding [83], no sustainable state-wide program has been implemented to reduce the future risk of similar water debt accumulation.

For larger systems, new investments in high-cost water sources, like desalination or pipelines, to address the climate pressures also increase water rates and compound the water affordability crisis [84–86]. For smaller systems, either they must set rates higher to compensate for not having the advantage of an economy of scale or operate a water system with higher risk of providing compromised water quality [87,88]. Either way, higher prices are passed along to households, leaving many with the painful choice of paying for water or other essential household expenses [89,90].

Not everyone will be equally exposed or vulnerable to the triple threat of infrastructural degradation, institutional inertia, and climate change. Because water management, at least in the U.S., is highly fragmented and localized [91], there is variation in water providers’ ability to envision solutions, advocate for change, and finance appropriate interventions. Responses to these exposures will therefore likely reflect existing social fissures, local regulatory constraints, and social vulnerabilities that lead to maladaptation, migration, and disruption at a scale that society is unprepared to manage.

3. Current data sources

While we have anecdotal evidence that the U.S. is increasingly living beyond peak water security, there are critical data gaps. Information about the extent and severity of household water insecurity has never been collected in any standardized or systematic manner in this context. Researchers and policymakers rely on various public data sources or proxy measurements [e.g., 92] but lack adequate and validated measures, thus limiting our ability to assess and respond to the compounding consequences of living beyond peak water security.

Data on water insecurity experiences collected around the world have enhanced our understanding of how water services affect basic underpinnings of society such as health and well-being [e.g., 93,94–96], opportunities for education [97,98], economic livelihoods and expenditures [99,100], and conflict and violence [101,102]. Yet, most of the available data in the U.S. tend to reflect just a few dimensions of water insecurity: water availability and use, water affordability, or water quality. These characteristics are neither easy to assess nor systematically collected at the household scale [103]. Rather, these supply-side metrics are often at the utility scale or represent structure-level infrastructure such as the availability of on-premise plumbing, usually with little complementary demand-side data beyond household metering. Given the challenges of living beyond peak water security, high-resolution water insecurity experience data can help communities, water providers, and all levels of government to identify specific policies that efficiently target technological, ecological, and social infrastructure investments in water security [104]. For example, a utility could resolve a persistent water quantity problem by deploying new physical infrastructure, repairing existing infrastructure, or adopting a communication strategy that targets customer service expectations depending on the nature of the water insecurity experiences reported by a given community.

4. From the ground up: Developing new water insecurity experiences metrics

Our interdisciplinary team has responded to these gaps in generating demand-side, household-level water security metrics. Several of us were part of the leadership team of the original HWISE scale project that began in 2017 [113] and have contributed to formative research on water insecurity in high-income contexts [e.g., 19,20,114–116]. Those efforts have reframed debates and scholarship from supply-side analyses of water security to highlight the lived experience of water insecurity [104]. We are now applying what we learned in LMICs to address long-standing and underappreciated forms of water insecurity here in the U.S.

Our project goals are twofold, with methodological and substantive contributions. First, we will validate a household water insecurity scale for the U.S. and develop a cross-culturally validated scale that can be used across high-income contexts internationally. We note that household water insecurity is embedded in historical dispossession, poverty, structural racism, and other interconnected social, ecological, economic, and political vulnerabilities across North America [117,118], Europe [119,120], and Australasia [121,122]. Second, as we did with the original HWISE Scale, we will test a variety of hypotheses about the causes and consequences of water insecurity in high-income settings to make policy-relevant recommendations to government agencies and utilities to improve access and equity. The HWISE Scale developed for LMICs has been used as a tool for a variety of policy and implementation goals including community advocacy, setting government targets for poverty reduction, identifying potential water system leaks and related problems, and improving monitoring and evaluation of water interventions [104].

The HWISE-USA scale will include questions that refer to the experiences of the respondent’s household. The questions focus on the frequency of self-reported, water-related behaviors and experiences in the past four weeks. For example, we will test candidate items for the scale that address affordability, trust, water quality experiences, affective experiences, water supply and access, reliability, and adaptive coping behaviors. We will use standard item reduction and validation procedures to optimize the number of items that best comprise the construct of household water insecurity experiences. Each scale item that is affirmed by a household respondent over the prior four weeks will be converted into frequency bins, scored, and summed into the HWISE-USA score in a similar manner as previous WISE scales [123].

All HWISE-USA project sites are implementing the same core modules about water insecurity (i.e., the scale candidate items), water supply and consumption, water affordability, water trust, and a few short validation modules. Most sites are also implementing additional standardized modules depending on that local community’s water needs. These additional modules measure sharing arrangements, quality and risk perceptions, capabilities, civic participation, bottled water use, emotions, and other psychological characteristics. Our approach to scale development follows best practices for validity, unidimensionality, and reliability. We also aim to preserve the spirit of the original HWISE scale that was developed for LMICs by focusing on items that are universal experiences of water insecurity in the U.S., even if they do not capture every dimension of water insecurity. In other words, this scale will ultimately contain items that represent the construct of water insecurity, broadly construed, that could apply to anyone experiencing it in the U.S. (and, we hope, eventually in any high-income context). The HWISE-USA project launched and began collecting pilot data in 2023 using a similar scale development framework as was used to create the original HWISE Scale. We completed the initial item development phase in 2024 and are currently engaged in community-based data collection in water-insecure communities that will be iteratively used for scale development and evaluation.

Our community-based research design is central to both our theoretical orientation toward demand-side water insecurity metrics and our practical expectations for their use. No one understands how water policies affect communities better than residents themselves. Many of our partner communities have endured historical social, political, and economic marginalization, and we emphasize the importance of including them so that these future metrics will be sensitive enough to capture variation in communities who are the least water-secure. More precise data can lead to more efficient, targeted policies and prioritization of what services governments and utilities provide.

In Fig 2, we use a logic model to highlight how demand-side, experiential metrics of water insecurity can be integrated into clean water infrastructure projects to yield tangible human and societal impacts. For example, in one community, the drivers of water insecurity may be associated with issues of water quality among renters. In this case, stakeholders could target the attendant policies addressing on-premise plumbing in rental units. In another community, affordability issues may drive water insecurity experiences, indicating that targeted tiered water pricing may do more to alleviate financial strain than an infrastructure project. We can even imagine that widespread chronic water quality concerns stemming from, for example, contaminated piped infrastructure at both the municipality and household levels, may require more comprehensive community-level assessment of on-premise plumbing. In this case, water may be affordable but unsafe, and plumbing upgrades could eventually reverse consumption of costly bottled water or unhealthy sugar-sweetened beverages. Each of these examples demonstrate how water insecurity experiences data can be leveraged to not only produce outcomes, such as repaired plumbing connections or implementations of new pricing structures, but can be linked to human impacts that reflect improvements to health, wellness, or livelihoods.

Download:

• PPT
  PowerPoint slide
• PNG
  larger image
• TIFF
  original image

Fig 2. Logic model demonstrating how demand-side, experiential metrics of water insecurity at the individual and household level can be integrated into clean water infrastructure projects.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pwat.0000413.g002

In sum, our community-informed design is intended to increase public trust with utilities and local service providers, government leaders, and the scientific community. We cannot expect the public to support infrastructure policy, particularly significant capital expenditures and neighborhood disruption during construction, or trust the new services being provided if the public is not engaged in the process. User acceptance is crucial, especially for novel forms of water infrastructure that can increase climate resilience, and can be achieved through public participation in the policy-making process [124].

5. Opportunities and conclusion

This essay summarizes a rationale and agenda for why new measures of water insecurity are immediately needed in the U.S. and other high-income settings. First, better tools can help all stakeholders—utilities, government officials, researchers, and communities themselves—discern local variation in water insecurity to prioritize resource allocation, especially in urgent contexts such as disaster recovery. Local governments receiving federal or private grants to improve water services would be better positioned to make evidence-based decisions about which services or geographical areas would be expected to yield the greatest enhancements to wellbeing, resilience, or adaptive capacity. These benefits, naturally, come with concomitant improvements in local economic development, tax revenue generation, and other municipal ripple effects (e.g., public health improvements), though great care is needed to avoid reproducing existing structural economic inequality [125]. In turn, communities who manage their own infrastructure would be poised to make evidence-based decisions in managing local water sharing arrangements or deploying other social infrastructure in times of need, such as after a natural hazard or economic shock [126,127].

Additionally, there is potential to use the HWISE-USA, and other future scales validated across high-income contexts, for monitoring and evaluation of water service upgrade/expansion projects. This will require an assessment of test-retest reliability to understand how well these scales perform over time using prospective data, and better characterization of how a change in scale values relates to substantive changes in health, wellness, or economic outcomes. Note that little of this formative work has been done with the existing WISE scales [103]. While the WISE scales are being deployed globally in LMICs with diverse policy objectives [104], their primary scientific utility is to understand heterogeneity in water insecurity. Still, we ultimately expect that new demand-side tools such as the HWISE-USA scale will help decision-makers make targeted, short-term infrastructure investments or policy decisions that translate into greater water security, and in turn, improved medium-term health, wellness, and economic stability. These are precisely the types of impacts, described in the last column of Fig 2, that save the government money in the long-term by reducing dependence on reactionary social safety nets and increasing tax receipts through enhanced economic vitality.

We are at a crucial turning point in how we will deal with growing challenges of basic water infrastructure. The reliance on supply-side metrics captures just a sliver of the impacts of household water insecurity, and there are currently no standards to help decision-makers, researchers, and community members systematically measure household-level impacts using demand-side, experiential metrics. This data vacuum leaves governments and policymakers flying blind in efforts to make evidence-based decisions to reduce health disparities associated with basic infrastructure, support marginalized communities that have historically been denied public services, and stimulate economic development. The time for action is now, and better demand-side data will support all stakeholders in rising to the massive challenge of universal water access in the new era of post-peak water security.